Abstract:This essay addresses the intriguing frequency of insect lyrics in seventeenth-century English poetry. While dramatic developments in the scientific and artistic regimes, including the invention of the microscope and the rise of still-life painting, undoubtedly played a role in this proliferation of entomological texts, this essay suggests that the figure of the insect was also deployed by early modern poets to probe the formal and imaginative potentialities of lyric, a genre that assumed a prominence over the … Show more
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